World War II Forums - View Single Post - What If Australia and New Zealand had been lost?

Slipdigit · #53 (**permalink**) December 10th, 2007, 03:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by von Rundstedt

You without realising one important fact and that is population at the time of the outbreak of WW2 Australia had a population of 7 million, we had during the war had something like 800,000 in our defence forces slightly higher that 10% of the entire population, this would equate to having at the time nearly 14 to 18 million serving in the US armed forces, yes our ship building was small but we batted well above our weight with such a small population. Could the US have done so much with 7 million population and that having more than 10% in the US Armed Sevices be able to produce the vast amount of war materiel it did and that would be a equivical NO it would not, the US would have only produced only 5% of what it did on the available manpower. Our population this year finally hit 21 million.

You fail to realize that I am not making light of the contribution of Australia. Facts are facts and your statement about the net effect of loss of Australia and NZ to the Japanese having a substantial positive effect on Japanese war production is misguided.

What I am left to wonder, reading your statement about the production abilities of the United States with a reduced population, is what factual data you could possibly reference to back this assertion and what possible relevance, if any, it has to the discussion of whether or not Japan would be significantly better off in possession of the Antipodes as to be considered a “industrial powerhouse.”

I will answer your statement in this thread later tonight.